University of Missouri President resigns after campus-wide protests

More than 70 Ball State students and faculty joined at the Frog Baby fountain for a prayer vigil on November 12 to show support for recent incidents of racial conflict at the University of Missouri.

This week’s events at the University of Missouri seemed to unfold rapidly, with little warning.

Police arrested 19-year-old Hunter Park for allegedly making online threats toward black students and faculty at the University of Missouri on Wednesday.

USF opened in 1956 in the thick of the civil rights movement and enrolled its first black student in 1961. They don’t want to be perceived as coming down in a really draconian way on students of color who are protesting against police violence or women who are protesting against the administration’s treatment of sexual assault on their campus. UVa’s NAACP Chapter president, who along with the UVa’s Black Student Alliance president, urged students to wear black on Grounds.

Park appeared in Boone County Circuit Court on Thursday, days after two of the University of Missouri’s senior admininstrators resigned following protests over the handling of racial incidents on the main Columbia campus. The Columbia campus’ chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, also announced Monday he would be leaving his position at year’s end for a new role at the school.

Students also signed pledges on social media showing their support to the black student community. “I felt lied to”. “I’m fighting for the Black community on campus, because justice is worth fighting for”.

Middleton said he keeps a list of those original demands on his desk.

Staff have numerous same complaints, said Cheryl Rodriguez, chairwoman of USF’s Department of Africana Studies and director of the Institute on Black Life.

But the Steering Committee of the Forum on Graduate Rights in a statement Friday said it looks forward to working with Interim University of Missouri System President Mike Middleton and Interim Chancellor Hank Foley to enact change. The appointment followed an emergency meeting of the four-campus system’s governing board Monday.

“It’s more the daily microaggressions than the large situations”, said Akosua Opokua-Achampong, a student at Boston College.

Members of the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus met Tuesday with protest organizers, including leaders of the group Concerned Student 1950 – named for the year the school admitted its first black student.

Efforts are underway at the University of Missouri to address the racial tensions that led to demonstrations by students, a strike by members of the school’s football team and the resignation of two top administrators.

About 58 percent of the more than 44,700 students from the USA enrolled at USF are white and 10.4 percent are African-American. Missouri chose to create a bare-bones law school for blacks in a former St. Louis beauty academy, leading Gaines to move north and earn a master’s degree in economics from the University of MI. He was last seen leaving a Chicago boarding house in 1939.

Stories like that aren’t new, students said. And a swastika drawn in feces was found recently in a dormitory bathroom.

Fear, and how to handle it, is something a lot of black students have talked about in the past couple of days. Hundreds of students on several USA campuses wore all-black clothing yesterday in a show of solidarity. Chief among them was the resignation of President Wolfe.

Not all students agreed with Daniels, however, and on Friday afternoon a Purdue graduate student tweeted a video showing a crowd of students chanting, “Mitch, let’s face it/it’s time to deal with the racists”. “But the president is just a symbol of the culture”.

Yale President Peter Salovey said Wednesday the administration is developing initiatives focused on improving the campus climate and fostering diversity at the Ivy League school.